Tag Archives: Bistro

I did wonder if it was fair to write a review for this place considering Martin ordered for me and I ate while running a trivia night! However, there are veggie options on the menu and the food was pretty good! Martin had a stir fry with noodles and I had pasta which came with a stack of veggies tossed through a creamy tomato sauce. As I said, it was pretty good, the only reason I didn’t finish it is because I was distracted and it got cold!

Spoiler: Don’t go here if you want a vegetarian meal. I wouldn’t want anyone to read just the first paragraph and get the wrong idea.

This is a bistro in a bowling club. We were here with a family group. The menu was huge and had a vegetarian section containing about half a dozen options. We were pleasantly surprised!

I decided I would have penne with pesto and Mel chose tomato and basil pasta. I ordered and, for my dish, the waitress wrote down “penne” so I repeated “penne pesto?”, which she confirmed. I noticed there was also penne boscaiola (or similar – too long ago to remember for sure) on the menu and that this contained bacon. I sat down and waited for my boscaiola.

My penne arrived without anything resembling pesto but complete with mushrooms and bacon. I took it back and said I wanted penne pesto and was told “yes, that is penne pesto”. I pointed to the menu and said “no, penne pesto is vegetarian, this has bacon”. “Oh! Vegetarian!” was the response. Right… we’ve got it now!

The waitress returned with a “new” dish a little while later. This time it was just penne, cream and mushrooms. It was very oily. It was not pesto but I decided to try and eat it. While eating it I discovered 2 pieces of bacon. After eating some amount of the pasta and mushrooms there was about 1cm of oil in the bottom of the bowl and I gave up in disgust. We decided they had probably picked out the bacon from the original dish and then “freshened it up” by applying a dollop of butter and popping it in the microwave.

Mel found at least 2 pieces of bacon in her vegetarian tomato and basil pasta.

This was the worst attempt at a vegetarian meal I have had in over 10 years. The waitstaff don’t know what is on their menu and they don’t understand the word “vegetarian”. Despite the vegetarian section on the menu there is no vegetarian food. The best thing I can say about the food was that I was not violently ill – I only felt queasy from eating so much grease.

We don’t eat here often. But we were being good residents and attending a meeting, so we thought we would have dinner here first. The menu is mainly meat based, but there are a few veggie options and of course the salad bar. The veggie options consist of stir fry, laksa and veggie strudel. We have had all of these at some point and they are a bit hit and miss, but they have never been outstanding. We usually just go with the salad bar, which is pretty standard and has at least one veggie soup, one veggie pasta sauce and an assortment of salad stuff. This time I also wanted a plate of roast vegetables of the day, which is listed on the specials menu, but isn’t actually a dish. But they were accommodating and only charged the same price as a plate of chips. The food is ok, if you like salad bars or meaty bistro type food. Personally I would prefer to eat something a little more exciting!

This was the other restaurant in the Lake Louise Inn and our only option for breakfast. We decided to go with the breakfast buffet as we thought it would provide us with enough veggie options as well as cereal, toast and fruit etc. However, after piling my plate with scrambled eggs and hash browns, I discovered that there was more than just potatoes in the hash browns… there was also shredded bacon in it – YUCK! They really should tell you that, especially since they went to all that effort to have a sign saying hash browns in front of the bain marie. So, I ended up with scrambled eggs, a couple of dry bits of french toast and some oatmeal. The fruit looked horrible and all the cheese that they had was sitting on top of slices of meat… all in all, not a great breakfast!

Well, there are only three restaurants (including this one) in Hay that we could see on the main street. Two of them were closed until mid March and the supermarkets close at 5:30pm sharp! So, that left us with the choice of a counter meal in a pub (not usually a good idea veggie wise), pizza from the local fish and chip shop or the Jolly Jumbuck Bistro – where the only veggie thing actually on the menu was “Vegetarian pasta” and garlic bread. Well, we skipped the garlic bread and Martin opted for the “vegetarian pasta”, while I was a bit more adventurous (after checking what was actually in the other pastas) and ordered the Fettuccine alla Romano without the bacon – which they were happy to do. And the food was pretty good! The servings were large and came with veggies or salad – we both went for salad for which my only complaint would be that the olives were horrible and sadly for Martin they were in his pasta sauce as well as his salad! Having seen the menus for the other places – one had a veggie pizza and the other standard Chinese food – veggies in oyster, blackbean or sweet and sour sauce – I would definitely recommend eating here if you are in Hay. If you are vegetarian, I certainly wouldn’t recommend staying more then one night – as your dinner choices would be severely limited!